Main Drag Improvisers Series: January 10, 2024

 January 10th kicked off the second year of the Wednesday series at Main Drag with three trios and two quartets. Despite some common threads of personnel, instrumentation, and even form between the sets, this was another night of five different worlds built by unique combinations of equally unique improvisers.

I had been particularly looking forward to the first set, featuring guitarist Gian Perez, electric bassist Tete Leguia, and drummer Nick Neuburg, all players with highly personal styles of extended techniques. Their combination of prepared guitar, prepared bass, and prepared drums produced many soundscapes of satisfying bizarreness. However, they began linearly without any “preparations”, though all had switched to the noisy side just a few minutes in. The whole set was full of these rapid shifts, but few felt abrupt; often one player focused more on lines while the other two were noise-ing, and vice versa. The bowings, scratchings, sticks between the strings, foam blocks rubbed on the drums, and all the other instrumental modifications were like a filter of absurdity rather than a visit to a separate dimension. These players always stood out from each other texturally, but this was ultimately a tight trio with well-timed dynamic ups and downs.

Though Nick Neuburg stayed on stage for the next group - another guitar-bass-drums trio - this one had a completely different vibe. Luke Rovinsky on guitar and Caleb Duval on acoustic bass kept up a sparking, crackling edge with plenty of effects pedals. This was a very loud set; in sustained peaks of volume the drums were lost in all the voltage. I appreciate the catharsis in this kind of playing, but hearing it live was definitely a bit overwhelming. Relief came when Rovinsky and Duval took a more percussive approach, resulting in fractured interplay with nothing too loud to hear. One of these percussive moments happened right at the beginning of the set. Like the previous trio - and another featuring Duval that I’ve reviewed earlier - this group held back a little for the first few minutes and then dug in. I wonder if this is a new form pattern that free improvisers are starting to fall into, like the “one more short one” at the end that everyone was doing back around 2016-18.

For his first trio of 2024, Stephen Gauci was joined by regular bassist Adam Lane and drummer Kevin Shea. One of today’s most unmistakable voices on the drums, Shea brings a steady stream of high intensity to this lineup. He certainly reacts to what Gauci and Lane are doing, but instead of punctuating their lines the way Colin Hinton does, he often lays down a roiling surface for them to clash and wrassle over. Shea makes his fair share of unexpected choices too; at one point this time he dropped out right as Gauci and Lane reached their climactic screech and skronk zone, leaving them to duke it out as a duo. Gauci switched to clarinet for this trio’s second episode; he blows just as wildly and brightly on this instrument as on tenor sax. What began as a would-be woody interlude soon escalated to the high harmonics, with the clarinet’s higher fundamental kicking things up yet another notch. Then Gauci was back to tenor for some extra fury before a clangorous Shea solo.

Both the fourth and fifth lineups were quartets: sax, guitar, electric bass, and drums. Tenor saxophonist Michael Eaton, guitarist Max Kutner, bassist Adam Minkoff, and drummer Nick Anderson got right into it from the start, no holds barred. This group’s sound was always more texture than line, in both loud sections and soft. Kutner was at his noisiest, constantly getting into goofy timbral shenanigans. Eaton, with his multiphonics and shredding, managed to sound just as distorted as the guitar and bass. Though this quartet unleashed a lot of chaos, there was plenty of clarity here as well. The first half had a well-defined form, from blasting to ballad and back to blasting; in the more fragmented second half, everyone’s gestures were clear despite the densely overlapping ideas.

Any time Kevin Shea and guitarist Sandy Ewen are playing, things are guaranteed to get unhinged. In the last set, things certainly did so - in a particularly alien way with the presence of Welf Dorr on alto sax and Jeong Lim Yang on bass. In this quartet, melodic and non-melodic approaches combined in the kind of way that always fascinates me. Dorr and Yang largely stuck to pure melody, while Ewen, always the prepared guitar specialist, stayed resolutely noisy. With so much linear vocabulary around her, it seemed that at any point Ewen could suddenly break into lines or chords even though she never did. On the other hand, any time she started playing after dropping out for a while, the sax and bass became that much more textural by association. At first Shea joined the fray with his signature river of rolls and rattles, but halfway through the set he hit a funky groove that turned the proceedings into straight-up No Wave. From then on it was one party beat after another, with varying degrees of sax and bass engagement while Ewen chirped and croaked away with her springs and scrapers. The last seven minutes were filled with a fun blend of No Wave, bossa, and pop punk that could only have been fueled by Shea. The very end spiraled out of control when Yang joined Ewen’s droning with her bow (in fact all three electric bassists tonight used a bow at some point!), but ultimately Shea got the last word, winding the tempo down by himself.

Watch the whole show on Youtube!